Migration and Transculturation in the Digital Age: A Framework for Studying the “Space Between”

Transnational immigrants today appear to live dual or even multiple lives across national borders, with help from a range of new technologies involving media and channels of communication such as Internet-based chat or telephony, mobile phones, and interactive online social networks. The authors explore the implications of accumulated findings on this aspect for researchers and scholars investigating the contemporary experience of global migration in relation to diasporas and their technology-enabled interconnections with home and host societies. Against the context of existing conceptual frameworks, the utility of the multi-dimensional construct of transculturalism (Ortiz, 1995 [1940]), involving the three processes of acculturation, deculturation, and neo-culturation, is considered as a guiding concept in this emerging area of study